*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

Where’s my cow poke, cowboy hat and cowboy boots?  I need to wrestle them up because I’m going to Oklahoma City!  While in town I’ll be speaking at two different .Net meetings on Monday June 1st. 

Due to a crazy flight schedule and two speaking engagements, one Monday at lunch and another that night, I’ll be arriving on Sunday evening if anyone wants to get together at Bricktown for some dinner.  You can find me easily on Twitter to find out where I’m at and what’s going on while I’m traveling:  http://twitter.com/keithelder

This will be my first trip to Oklahoma in a long long time and I’m looking forward to it.  Here are the details on where I’ll be when on Monday.

Lunch Meeting: Demystyfying Windows Communication Foundation
Time: 11:30am – 1pm
Location: The Oklahoma City Coworking Collaborative
Windows Communication Foundation was released with the .Net 3.0 framework and is the future of the platform for distributed computing. With .Net 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) became a first class citizen with additional tooling and add ons for Windows Workflow Foundation. In this session we are going to look at WCF from the standpoint of how to transition from ASMX web services and some of the important things you should know about WCF. If you have been hesitant in adopting WCF and still writing ASMX web services, this session will hopefully put you over the edge to giving WCF a try. I assure you, once you do, you will never look back. Don’t worry though, this isn’t a complete WCF sales pitch. We’ll also do a rusty washers / shinny pennies comparison about WCF to get a real world feel for where it stands. In other words, no sugar coating, just straight talk.

Evening Meeting: Deploying WCF services: How to not pull your hair out!
Time: 6pm – 8pm
Location: The Oklahoma City Coworking Collaborative
Don’t you love it when you go to a conference and the speaker shows you a new technology like Windows Communication Foundation (henceforth abbreviated as WCF)? You then head back to the office, start playing with it and then you find all sorts of things that make life difficult when it comes time to deploy it. I know how this feels and this is why you need to come to hear this talk. This session was created out of the pain experienced in deploying WCF services with IIS7 in the enterprise. What makes this talk different is it is mostly one long demo where we break things and then fix them. We’ll look at how to setup IIS7, how to configure IIS7 with multiple host headers, what that does to your WCF services and how to make everything play nicely with the other children. We’ll also configure our services and IIS7 to support the net.tcp and net.msmq protocol and talk about WAS (windows activation service). Then once we get everything working we’ll have a throw down to see which WCF binding outperforms the others.

I was sitting at the computer late on Sunday trying to catch up on work from being gone all weekend when an email came into my inbox. It was marked “URGENT” and was giving off a vibe of panic.  Myself and several other INETA speakers from the South were asked to step in for a fellow INETA speaker who had to cancel an engagement.  Baton Rouge is only a 2.5 hour drive away from me so I stepped in.  Maybe someone will step in when I am in need one day.

At any rate, I will be speaking in Baton Rouge on Wednesday, May 20th at the local .Net User Group there.  I’ll be talking on WCF, building services, configuration, deployment, and on whatever the audience wants to talk about. 

If you are in the area, I hope you’ll come out!

http://deepfriedbytes.com/podcast/episode-31-being-dynamic-about-ironpython-with-harry-pierson-ndash-part-1/ 

http://deepfriedbytes.com/podcast/episode-32-being-dynamic-about-ironpython-with-harry-pierson-ndash-part-2/

In this episode we sat down with Harry Pierson, Program Manager on the Visual Studio languages team.  Harry loves IronPython and dynamic languages as is a wealth of information.  We get the scoop on tons of IronPython stuff including a discussion on how Microsoft handles an open source project like IronPython.  We even threw in a rusty washers segment.  Two shows you certainly don’t want to  miss!

If I am sitting at my computer I have music playing.  I used to not be so bad about having to have music playing.   But lately I can’t stand the silence, I have to have some type of noise (I know many developers share the same sentiment).  Since I need music to work and my wife needs silence to work, I kept having to swap from speakers to headphones.  This was a problem, until Windows 7.

The standard household ritual goes something like this:

ME Singing: “…. you give love…. a BAD NAME…”

Wife:  “…stop singing I’m trying to work….”

ME:  “… ok, sorry, got carried away, really good song there”

Wife:  “…. and put your headphones on…”

ME:  “… yes dear…”

When running Vista this meant I had to stop whatever it was I was listening to right in the middle and shut the application down.  Then I had to switch my default sound device from speakers to headphones.  Thus whatever was playing (Zune, Pandora or whatever) I’d have to shut it down right in the middle of whatever it was I was listening to.  Then I’d press the Windows key on the keyboard and type “sound” as shown below to open the sound settings and move the default device to my headphones.  Then I’d restart the app and music would be playing on my headphones. 

This was painful. 

Windows 7 makes this story much easier and works the way I had originally thought it should.  In Windows 7 I press the Windows key on the keyboard and type “sound” as before in Vista.  First thing you’ll notice is the search screen looks completely different and provides more options because the search has gotten better.  The UI is now just about search as the other navigation options have been removed. 

There are three options listed in the control panel section and two of them take you to the exact same place, one is just more explicit (which is good).  When clicked the standard sound settings dialog opens up.

As you can see above I currently have the headphones set as the default device and you can also see music is currently playing.  Selecting the speaker option and clicking the button will immediately switch all the audio to the new output.

Finally this works as I would expect in real-time.  I can now switch from speakers to headphones within about 3 seconds now. 

But!  Sound in Windows 7 doesn’t stop there though.  There are other features in the sound subsystem of Windows 7 including the ability to handle communication devices.  For example, if Windows detects you received a telephone call via your PC (think Live Messenger, Skype, etc) there are several options that allow you to mute all other sounds on the computer or reduce the volume.  This is called “ducking”. 

If you want more detailed geeky information about sound in Windows 7 watch Larry Osterman’s video on Channel 9 which includes demos of stream switching and ducking.

It is May and that means Crawfish are in season down South.  It is one of these things we just do down here and if you’ve never had crawfish before I hope you’ll get a chance to experience it one day. 

This past weekend I cooked a sack of crawfish along with an assortment of vegetables in the mix and they turned out fantastic.  Well, I thought they were fantastic but some of my friends thought they were on the tad spicy side.  Oh well, you can’t please everyone right?

Too me the vegetables are just as important part of a crawfish boil as the crawfish and they make for a great filler and believe it or not they absorb a lot of the spices. 

In this batch I had potatoes, corn, mushrooms, broccoli, asparagus, and onion.  It turns into a beautiful arrangement of reds, green and yellow in the pot. Of course you can’t forget the sausage.  I typically use Conechuh Sausage in mine but I also had some green onion sausage I picked up as a filler (Conechuh is expensive).  All in all it was a good time even though it is a lot of work.

Updated: 5/13/2009

It seems my choice of vegetables in my crawfish has some puzzled some so let me clarify how I cook it.  Let’s start with the mushrooms.  I use a whole pack of mushrooms per pot, sometimes two (i usually get them from Sam’s Club).  The trick is to not overcook them and the only way to do that is to put them in after the heat is turned off.  The mushrooms are always a favorite.  They are juicy, a little spicy and carry a lot of flavor.  After the crawfish come to a boil for 5 minutes, the heat is turned off and then I add in the mushrooms, stirring them in while the crawfish soak. 

For the asparagus and broccoli I wait about 5 minutes before putting them in.   I’ve also used cauliflower.  I’ll warn you again, the broccoli will be hot (as in pepper hot, so will cauliflower).